“I’ve been recognized every now and then. It’s always in computer stores. It’s something like brain associations, because I’ll be in the grocery store and nobody will recognize me. Even in my glasses, looking exactly like my picture, nobody will recognize me. But I could be totally clean-shaven, hat on, looking nothing like myself in a computer store, and they’re like, “Snowden?!””

“In an amazing fashion, the events of ancient tales of the mythological hero, Heracles, can be adapted to here and now, when the three-headed Cerberus evokes USA, when the defeat of the Stymphalian birds is putting the stop to aerial bombing in Syria, and the cleaning of the Augean stables is the fight against corruption.”

In the context of the current war, faith in the idea of national ‘purity’ often comes couched in rationalist terms, positing no known cure for the Soviet hangover in the Donbas, and, in any case, no time to look for one.

It’s not easy being punk. It’s even harder to keep believing in punk (or, by extension, anarchism, activism, and the like). For a style of life and art that seems hell-bent on offending, punk lays down a surprising number of unwritten rules. The first commandment: Thou shalt not sell out.

When Ryan Fogle, Third Secretary at the American Embassy in Moscow, was arrested for attempting to recruit a Russian security-services officer, the world sat up and took notice. Then it snickered and sat down again.

On the face of things, “The Americans” should be pressing all sorts of buttons in the American psyche: crypto-communists! danger in the suburbs! our neighbors hate our freedoms! Moreover, since the Soviet agents and our main point-of-view characters, the show is implicitly asking us to root for the KGB. Why isn’t Fox News all over this?

This blog-post grows from a group discussion that began over Facebook, and includes input from Eliot Borenstein, Serguei Oushakine, Kevin Platt, Katie Holt, Bella Grigoryan, Maksim Hanukai, Rossen Djagalov, Jesse Labov, and Roman Utkin.

About the Center

The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia was established in 2011 thanks to a generous gift from the family of NYU alumni Boris and Elizabeth Jordan. The mission of the Center is to make Russia intrinsic to all aspects of scholarly investigation: from history to visual culture, literature to economics, anthropology to politics.